148	A Short History of the Middle East
change in the numbers or status of the Jews in Palestine till the
'eighties, when the nationalist reaction in Russia, then the home of
two-thirds of world-Jewry, to the murder of the Tsar was followed
by an outbreak of anti-Jewish outrages, in which hundreds were
killed and thousands ruined, while discriminatory anti-Jewish
legislation was enforced over a period of three years. There was a
large-scale exodus of Jews from Russia, finding ready admission
into North America and Britain in those easygoing and liberal days.
A small proportion of the emigrants went to Palestine, where some
of them settled on the land with the financial help of Baron de
Rothschild, and readily employed the Arab fellahin to cultivate the
lands for them. By the outbreak of the First World War the
Jewish population of Palestine was over 80,000. The growth of
their agricultural settlements, despite many material difficulties, to
the number of forty-four with a total population of about 12,000
had already provoked some Arab opposition. The American geo-
grapher Ellsworth Huntington, who was in Palestine in 1909,
wrote: 'The fellahin of the Plain of Sharon and of other fertile
parts of Palestine, such as Carmel and parts of the Jordan Valley,
see in the Jew their greatest enemy. . . . Around Jaffa the Jewish
colonies are undoubtedly successful, so much so that the native
population is sorely jealous. In enmity towards the colonists they
steal the fruit and break the branches in the orchards, turn horses
into the grain-fields and break down hedges.'1 In 1912 there was
an angry scene in the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, when Arab
deputies protested against the Jewish acquisition of large areas of
arable land in the Plain of Esdraelon from absentee landlords and
the threatened dispossession of the tenants,2
Meanwhile the growing anti-Jewish prejudice in Europe, which
reached flash-point in France in the Affaire Dreyfus, had had a pro-
found effect on a Viennese j ounialist Theodor Herzl, 'one on whom
his Jewish origin lay so lightly that it is probable that... he often
completely forgot it.' But stung now by the sense of helplessness
and homelessness of the Jews faced by unreasoning persecution, he
1	Palestine and its Transformation (1911), 87.
2	Geo. Antonius, op. cit. 259.   In the early years of the British mandate these
lands were transferred to the Jews. Twenty-one Arab villages disappeared from
the map of Palestine, and it has never been definitely established what hap-
pened to their inhabitants. The tenants (but not the landless labourers) are said
to have been compensated by the Jewish purchasers to the extent of about 4 per
cent, of the purchase-price.  The landlords, a wealthy and cosmopolitan Beirut
Christian family, gave them no compensation.   (Barbour, op. cit., 117 f.)